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Starry-Eyed Astronomer no more

"Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars." This was headline news on the day I went to meet Jane Luu, defense systems engineer and award-winning planetary astronomer. Early in her career, Luu scoped the cosmos, studying the dark void beyond Neptune. With her Ph.D. adviser David Jewitt,...

YouTube at the Bench

As a graduate student at Princeton University, Moshe Pritsker tried in vain to grow a culture of embryonic stem cells using instructions from the methods section of a journal article. A colleague with more bench experience tried and also failed. Finally, Pritsker flew to Edinburgh...

Those TAs with Thick Accents

Progress has been made in recent decades on ensuring that foreign graduate students at American universities have sufficient facility in the English language that they're most likely to be teaching in. The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), or the comparable IELTS exam,...

Just Herself

“One of my formative experiences in Karachi happened when, as a 10-year-old, I would take my bicycle to the bike repair shop right outside our apartment compound,” the scientist recalls. “Rather than just repairing my bike for me, the man at the shop taught me...

Space Cadet

In 2011, I wrote about microbiologist Kate Rubins, PI at the Whitehead Institute, who was picked to be AsCan (Astronaut Candidate). She trained for 2 years, got a chance to go to the International Space Station and is now back on earth. Ed Yong interviews...

Making Each Other More Human

A husband and a wife working in the same scientific discipline are ideally positioned to be collaborators, but aligning ambitions in the professional niche of fundamental research is seldom easy: Institutions must accommodate not just one scientist but a pair. And once a...